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Talking point: Net delivers consumer nirvana

I grew up at a time when blockbusters defined our culture. I bought Wham!'s greatest hits, lapped up Star Wars and wasted hours devouring cast-off Jeffrey Archers. Thanks to the web, during a decade of browsing online, my interests evolved in a thousand serendipitous directions. All this seemed the way of the world, until I read an article by Chris Anderson, the ultra-bright editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, introducing what he calls "the long tail" of growing consumer choice. Book sales illustrate the web's influence. While on the high street Waterstone's stocks 100,000 titles, the online retailer Amazon can carry 3.7m, because shelf space poses no limitations and technology has transformed the buying process. In the marketplace of the digital era, the graph plotting the demand curve (sales v number of products) still records the million-selling hits, but the web has extended the long tail of demand for items not previously